I’ve had disturbing encounters with literature and film before: Reinaldo Arenas’s The Color of Summer (2000) and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). Their unsettling nature lies in the ways in which they link sex and violence, and show their hooks in the political body and the (masculine) soul. Against oppressive régimes (whether socialist or capitalist), these texts engage in ambiguous defences of instincts that aren’t much prettier than the systems against which their anti-heroes rail.
A.L. McCann’s Subtopia fits in here, insistently presenting links between sex and violence. These instincts are associated with a malign and patriarchal capitalism, imaged in the asbestosis and cancer from which the characters, subsisting in the dystopian suburbs of Melbourne in the 1970s and 1980s, frequently suffer. However, they are also embedded in the characters, shaping even how they rebel.
Subtopia by A.L. McCann
Vulgar Press, $29.95pb, 280pp, 0958079560
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